Sep 122020
 

 

Greetings, ladies and germs. As promised in yesterday’s round-up, I have MANY more selections of new music for your listening pleasure. Does this mean that I’m now caught up in showing you what I’ve discovered? Oh, hell no! I will have more in tomorrow’s SHADES OF BLACK column (and still won’t be caught up).

To speed things along I’m just throwing you the music streams and my usual impulsive commentary, sans artwork. Later today I’ll fill in the art, a few more details about the releases, and the usual ordering and FB links. The following tracks are presented in alphabetical order by band name (with Greece coincidentally represented at the beginning and the end), and I’ll tell you that the music is all over the map stylistically.

DEPHOSPHORUS (Greece)

This first song is such a heavyweight neck-wrecker at the beginning, although filaments of ravishing melody rapidly spiral out from beneath its bone-breaking rhythm. However, the song also explodes in breathtaking fashion — a storm of battering drums, blizzard-like guitars, and truly wild, howling vocal ferocity. The track is tremendously thrilling in all of its course-changes, which include sweeping, fire-bright sonic panoramas; the sludgy heft of the low end is a thrill all its own. Continue reading »

Mar 242016
 

Thanatopsis art

 

We’re about to bring you a blast from the past that’s now very much a part of the present.

Thanatopsis are originally from Oakland, CA, where the four founding members, Chris Stolle, Dave Couch, John Bishop, and Thom Hall got together in 1992 under the name Existence. Shortly thereafter, the band changed their name to Thanatopsis, after the poem by William Cullen Bryant, which translates to Meditation upon Death.

Between 1993 and 1997, the band released four demos and played some high-profile shows in the Bay Area, gaining a reputation for their distinctive approach to death metal. However, the group officially disbanded in 1997. There was a brief reunion in 2004 when the band played one show with death metal brethren Deeds of Flesh and Vile, and one show with Agent Steel, but beyond those two successful shows, the reunion was short-lived. Continue reading »